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Sunday, January 15, 2017

Chasing Joy

Each week I celebrate the positives with Ruth Ayres and her community of writers at Celebrate This Week. While this past week has been one of nursing an acute sinus infection, Friday night I was able to step out of the house with my family for some errands in an attempt to return to normalcy. During that break from being housebound, I found myself caught up in a spontaneous, fun-filled adventure to capture the beauty of nature.

Unplanned moments can lead to wonder. Since the opening of the year, I have been trying to find joy, my one word,in the most ordinary of places. When I saw the moon take a striking pose in the night sky, I knew that I had to follow it to find the right position for a photograph. A crazy idea, you may say, but nonetheless one that needed to be captured in my mind because a few moments of carefree adventure could bring some fun.Joy seems to be infectious so I even got my husband interested in the pursuit. Each time we stopped at a red light he would pull out his tablet. I simultaneously would be ready to take a shot with my iPhone for the moon was a most unusual sight in the night sky. It appeared to be stamped onto a black canvas, an ink splotch in the sky that peeked through striated clouds and branches. It was eerie but afterall it was Friday the 13th. The image below is the compilation of merging different facets of the moonlit adventure.

I went to sleep thinking about the coincidence of the moon meeting Friday the 13th and woke to another luminescent view of the moon. Two separate views led me to wonder even more. If I was in the classroom, this would make for an interesting conversation about science, nature, and the superstitions surrounding Friday the 13th. For me the coincidental meeting of a full moon on Friday the 13th provided an opportunity to find joy in the night sky. *If you look closely at the first #imagepoem, you will see that Friday the 13th played a trick on me. There are faint words in the background that were embedded as I created. Little did I know until I posted. Life is full of mysteries!

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About Me

Carol Varsalona, ELA consultant, has had extensive experience as a director of language arts, a literacy specialist/reading teacher, national/state conference presenter, and a staff developer in multiple Long Island districts and BOCES. In addition, she is a blogger, writer, co-moderator of NYEDChat, a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter where she communicates with various state PLNs and global educational leaders, and recently appointed Wonder Lead Ambassador for Wonderopolis. She has a Professional Diploma in School District Administration, a CAS in Reading, MS in Developmental Reading, and BA in English Education. Varsalona is a lifelong learner dedicated to energizing and impacting K-12 teaching and literacy learning through the development of thinking skills, integrated technologies, writer’s voice, and professional development opportunities. She is ardent about inviting vigor and engagement into education to redesign the literacy landscape

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